About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

An ordinary open source marketing funnel is really wide at the top – think about the many millions of downloads. Prospects enter the funnel, sometimes deploy by themselves, sometimes they simply don’t, but only few continue down to the bottom. What happens in the middle?

MySQL Webinars might stay free, but you might consider to sell their transcriptions, maybe including manuals or other infoproducts. Community of software deployers’s outputs, like the Italian OpenOffice.org FAQ, could also be repackaged and sold to customers. Sun might well create infoproducts out of everything, the limit is the sky.

Free software and other materials help to create relationships, then you can start to sell them your prospects low-priced products and services, eventually bringing them to become repetitive customers who will buy subscriptions.